Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Could you take just a real quick second and uh explain a little bit to our audience about who you are and what you do? Sure, I'm an M&A. Thanks for having me. I'm an M&A advisor. I help business owners sell their business or transition their business to the next generation or help them turn it into an ESOP if they wanna sell it to their employees. So basically hand holding them from what they built up to today to transitioning to the next phase of their life. OK, good. So today we're gonna talk about facilitating a business exit. So you've had done a lot of these transactions, I know, where do business owners usually struggle when it comes to that? The biggest struggle is understanding the value of their business. They think that the value of their business could be what they need to retire. They might think that the value of the business is something similar to. Somebody else doing the same industry or another friend selling their business, when in reality every business has a specific valuation that is based on how your business is structured. If your business is fully reliant on you and you are doing everything, you have very few clients, then the valuation is going to be quite low. If you've built your business into a small corporation or a corporate-like structure. Where you have a much bigger pool of clients. So if one client leaves, it's not going to do a lot of damage on the revenue, and then your evaluation is going to be much bigger. So this is just one example, but there are many moving parts that if everything is aligned, your valuation is going to be very high. If very little things are aligned, your evaluation is going to be very low. OK, so you mentioned a few things that could actually lower your valuation. Can you give me an example of someone you worked with in the past and And what they went through because of that. I've had clients that had a handful of clients. And from that handful of clients, 2 or 3 of them were 80 to 90% of their revenue. So when a buyer comes in for them, that's a very risky business even though these clients have been with him for over 20 years. But that doesn't mean that one of these clients will not leave and it doesn't mean that you have a bad relationship with a client, but that client's business model might change. They might hire a new CEO. You might lose that contact. They might want to reprice. So the risk factor, when it's very high, then your premium basically goes out the window, and explaining to them that the importance of having a wider pool of clients is quite important. Unfortunately, the client was convinced that 2 years of the same revenue source is something very solid. And unfortunately it happened that one of the clients started paying late, so he started having cash flow problems, and the business is not doing well today. OK. So we're in the, we're in the AI age. Um, a lot of people say, well, I can just go, you know, I can just ask AI how to exit my company. Uh, so before, before the interview, I actually did that. Uh, I took a look at your process and I compared it to what AI, uh, says is the path to follow. And what's kind of interesting is the difference. So I, my question for you is, as someone who's actually done this. What do you see in an exit that AI can't see? It's a lot of the moving parts. AI is great at giving you a framework on how to think, on what to expect. Valuations sometimes are done well, sometimes not, but you get good information. But good information is like having a game plan, and then you need to go on the field and actually execute that game plan. If you want to do a sports analogy, once you get on the field, things move in a very different way, and unexpected things are happening every second. So AI can give you a road map, but I've had a lot of experiences where the best business, amazing financials, diversified client base, very good buyer, and things like the economy happens, tariff happens, or there's a downturn in a specific industry, or let's say you have a pool of buyers. They all have liquidity, but their portfolio is built of probably an asset that matches what the buyer wants to acquire. So there's so many moving elements even as you are going through the process and assuming all the boxes are ticked off. It's just you cannot rely on static information, and if I'm going to summarize it, AI is static information. Go through the process is live information. OK, perfect. So let's, let's assume that. There's the AI AI way of doing things and there's your way of doing things, and yours works better, which I wouldn't. I wouldn't question that. Uh, but all of a sudden there's a major shift. First of all, what do you think? is most likely to happen, that could change the way exits are done. And then if that did happen, how would you adjust to it? The major shift in the private markets is accessibility of information. So in public markets, the financials are there, their strategies are there. There's analysts that are covering the businesses, so the amount of data that you have to analyze is exponentially more than in the private market. So at some point in time there is a software. And people trust that software with their private data to have better visibility on what a business is worth. I'm not saying an exact dollar value, but a range or a scorecard, or it could be a grade. Then it's easier to match businesses in the long run, and I think technology. As we move forward, it's going to get closer to that, but you have data privacy that is one big issue. You have another issue that most business owners, they do their financials in two folds one for the tax returns, one an actual PL and balance sheet, one on a cash basis, the other one on an approved basis. So having all of these things adjusted and most importantly, having people trust the system to put it out there. Is going to be the biggest challenge, but once you have that, then you'll have less friction in terms of buyers and sellers, and the role of the M&A advisor will be probably less on the financial rim and more of an advisor, basically somebody you can rely on to push back your buyer if they're asking too many questions that are not appropriate for that specific task that they want from you. So it's a myriad of things. Mostly it's having real information accessible to more people. OK. So a, a lot of the planning systems I've seen are seem to be really deal-focused, like, you know, gather the information, make a list of all the people who could buy your company, you know, reach out to them, those types of things. When I look at yours, it, it appears to me to be a little more value-focused. Is that fair to say? It is more value focused because you always want to ana analyze or assess where you are today. And based on that plan forward. Now things can happen and you might be forced to sell a business as quickly as possible, then you cannot be thinking about value building. But if you give yourself time, then you're preparing yourself to leverage your business with private equity, with the strategic buyer, with the high net worth individuals that's done really well in the corporate world. So you want to create options for your exit. You start building a management team that would want to acquire the business from you. Maybe like I said earlier, you want to turn it into ESOP. Finding buyers is not very difficult. Finding the right buyer is definitely a challenge, but there are many buyers that are knocking on business owners' doors on a daily basis, so I don't see that. The challenge. The challenge is having businesses that are exit ready and that can leverage everything that they build to get the highest price for it, and I would just add to that. Some business owners want the higher price. Some business owners want the well-being of their staff because their staff has been with them for a very long time. They look at them as family members and they don't want somebody to come and buy the business and rip it to pieces just to get the components that they want. OK. So let's say the, the goal is exitability and we're looking at that over a period of time, maybe next 2 or 3 years. So when you were working with somebody, what would be the one thing that you would look at that would signal that they're actually making progress? If you had to pick one metric, what do you think it'd be? Having the trust and having the framework to train their management team. And learning how to delegate and to trust the infrastructure that they've created up to today. That plays a huge role when an acquirer comes in because maybe somebody like I said earlier, is a high net worth individual, they are just buying the business as a source of revenue for them in the future and they have a lot of network and they believe they can grow the business through the network or through the relationships that they have built so the business owner cannot be the center of every decision making and cannot be the existence of the business. If you shift up and you shift the mindset that. The whole team can do the work that I'm doing if they train properly and we create the right infrastructure, then this is. The biggest mind shift any business owner can have. OK, so let's assume then that the management team is kind of the lever, uh, uh, behind all this, and you know, you have a plan in place. You've gotta have a lot of trust, but despite all good planning, sometimes things fail. So in that case, when, when there is some failure in the management team, how would you go about correcting that so the, so the business doesn't completely get off track. You need to understand the source of the failure. The source of the failure can be. Lack of training. Lack of ownership on the task that they have, maybe lack of the infrastructure in terms of the business model where there isn't enough profit sharing or there isn't. A path for them to be equity holders in the business, you need to incentivize your team and your team. Can be incentivized by many things. One of them could be financials. One of them could be the culture of the business. One of them could be the support system if they need to help their family members out, so the flexibility that you create for your team, once you understand the source, then you can mitigate these problems because finding new people for an opening in your business is expensive and is not. That easy to do. It's not you're plugging in one person and you're bringing in somebody else. It can happen, but more often than not, if you have the right candidate with the right mindset, the training and alignment of where they want to be in the near future and the long term can solve a lot of problems. Great interview, uh, very insightful. Any chance we can get you to come back sometime? Whatever you want. Thanks for your time, Norman. Appreciate, appreciate your time. Take care. That went good, I thought, I mean, that was really good, uh. So I'm